Five questions meme

pauraque gave me these five questions to answer! I'll come up with five questions for the first five people who ask, so please comment if you want to play.

1) If you could visit a fictional world, where would you go? Would you want to live there or just vacation?

Ever since I read Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series as a kid, I dreamed of visiting the Clayr's library. Mysteries spellbooks, forgotten lore, deep secret rooms full of undiscovered magic! I think practically speaking I'd have to go live there for good, since I'd need years of in-world study to be able to access the really cool stuff.

That's the answer I want to give. But I think really what I'd like most is to go to Tolkien's Hobbiton for a few weeks and let some small, round innkeeper stuff me full with six good meals a day between gentle hikes in the lush green countryside.
 

2) What's a book you've read that started out strong but didn't stick the ending?

I feel like I have this experience quite often, actually! It could be because endings are hard, but I think at least some of the blame has to go to my tendency to get overinvested and run away with my expectations. Too often once I've decided how I want things to go, any departure - even one of objectively good quality - is likely to leave me a bit disappointed.

But one book I think I can accuse without injustice of going bad at the end is a nonfiction one: Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen. After really loving her Operation Paperclip, I was eager for more hard-hitting, rigorously sourced investigative journalism about US government and military corruption, and for the most part that's what I got. But the ending ... oh man. I'm not sure it does justice to say the book didn't stick its landing; more like it quit gymnastics mid-vault and decided to switch to freestyle swimming, with exactly as much topsy-turvy flailing of arms as the mental image implies. In the last chapter or two it went full-tilt, bizarro-world conspiracy theorist about aliens and Soviet hoaxes. It's years now since I read it but I still remember that feeling of whiplash as if it were yesterday.

 

3) Do you have a sweet tooth? What kind of sweets do you like?

You know, I never used to have a sweet tooth! Not that long ago, I had only a handful of sweet recipes in any kind of rotation, and my go-to junk foods were mostly salty. But I developed fierce sugar cravings during pregnancy and so far they seem to have long outlived the hormonal trigger. I've become obsessed with pastries and cakes, especially the kinds of delicate layered sponge cakes that I used to snub my nose at in patisseries. A few weeks ago, a local cafe made the most amazing layered strawberry cake with real fresh strawberries that I'm desperate to learn how to bake for myself. I'm a big fan of thick, doughy cookies and really bitey lemon curd tarts. Supermarket-wise I love mars bars, oreos and tim-tams (I'm pretty sure they deport you from Australia if you don't like tim-tams). Sometimes - I'm not too proud to admit this - I eat nutella straight off the spoon.

 

4) What's a death metal band or album you would recommend to someone new to the genre?

The Jester Race was my immediate first thought, not least because it's one of the very first death metal albums I fell in love with. In Flames helped pioneer what's known as the Gothenburg style of melodic death metal, which is gentler and - per the name - more melodic than a lot of other death metal. There's a haunting, melancholy beauty to it that I think has a good chance of translating even to someone who's not used to the genre and its quirks.

Since it's a fairly large understatement to call death metal an acquired taste, one other thing I might suggest for someone new to the genre - if they were making a project of it, rather than just taking a peek - is to spend some time easing in with more mainstream metal bands, even if they're not ultimately what I would single out as my forever favourites. Most metalheads have their 'gateway bands' that helped acclimate them to the growling and fast tempos before they plunged in the deep end. I was already in love with harsh vocals via the emo/screamo scene before I came to metal, but that path has limited appeal past the teenage years, lol. Bands like Trivium and Lamb of God are like the pop music of the metal world - they're commercial and broadly accessible, and might make the bridge between clean singing and hrrrr grrrr blrrrrrrrrgh aaaargh seem more crossable for people who aren't used to it. Then of course there's the 'big four' of thrash metal - Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica, Megadeth - which, aside from being required reading or anyone who wants to understand extreme metal's origins, are a good first taster for the fast tempos and aggressive guitar styles that are synonymous with the genre.

But as a standalone sample album, yeah, I'm sticking with Jester Race. The opening track, Moonshield, is to this day one of my all-time favourites.

 

5) What's something you cooked recently that came out amazing?

After years spent poring greedily over feast scene after feast scene in Harry Potter, I recently decided to try making treacle tart! Turns out treacle is just golden syrup, which can be had on any supermarket shelf - in Australia, at least. A lot of the recipes I came across were from American food bloggers who had to courageously make their own.

Anyway, it took two tries to make, because I dropped the first pie crust fresh out of the oven and had to make a whole new batch of pastry from scratch. But the results were more than worth the extra effort. It wasn't sickly-sweet, like I feared it might be from the ingredients list. The lemon in the filling gave it a beautiful, rounded citrus flavour, and it was almost as delicious reheated as it was fresh. I've always found pastry too much of a faff for the everyday, but I'll just have to get over that, because I need more of this tart in my life.